Juno News - October 14, 2019


Conservative balanced budget law is a good start

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Andrew Scheer Justin Trudeau Research Instituteと思 Andrew Lawton
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Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

171.77

Word count

965

Sentence count

36


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Conservative Party has unveiled its official platform for the 2019 federal election, and in it is something that any sort of fiscally responsible person has been advocating for in Canada for years. Legislation that would require the government to balance the budget. A balanced budget law that basically means politicians can t in times of non-recession run up deficits just for the sake of it, just to spend their way into re-election perhaps?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The Conservative Party has unveiled its official platform for the 2019 federal
00:00:14.560 election and in it is something that any sort of fiscally responsible person has
00:00:19.480 been advocating for in Canada for years. Legislation that would require the
00:00:25.080 government to balance the budget. A balanced budget law that basically means
00:00:29.720 politicians can't in times of non-recession run-up deficits just for the sake of it,
00:00:35.880 just to spend their way into re-election perhaps. This is something that's especially timely given
00:00:41.720 that four years ago when Justin Trudeau and the Liberals were running they had initially said
00:00:46.200 there'd be a balanced budget then they said well there'd be like a teeny tiny deficit and then if
00:00:51.100 you look back the first three budgets that Justin Trudeau did racked up a total of about 52 billion
00:00:57.880 dollars in deficit spending and this year is expected to be a deficit potentially of 20 billion
00:01:03.220 dollars. Now this is obviously just the beginning the Liberals platform for the next four years
00:01:09.620 reveals 90 billion dollars in deficit spending cumulatively over the next four years which is
00:01:16.480 absolutely absurd and doesn't by the way include a cushion if there is a recession as many economists
00:01:22.980 are predicting. So the Conservative plan would put forward a law that requires governments to balance
00:01:28.560 the budget and the premise of this law seems to be that with the exception of in recession times
00:01:33.980 balance is always possible. But there's a hitch because Andrew Scheer himself is not planning to
00:01:39.980 balance the budget for the next four years. If he's elected there will not be under the Conservative
00:01:44.960 plan a balanced budget for his first four-year term. Now what's challenging here is that Andrew Scheer's
00:01:51.640 plan is binding future governments to something that his government is either not willing or not
00:01:57.560 able to do and it seems like he wants the best of both worlds. He wants to say this is a fiscally
00:02:02.880 responsible plan and because of this we're promising to balance the budget by law for future governments
00:02:08.720 but at the same time he also wants the goodies and the bonuses that come along within an election
00:02:14.440 promising to spend more than the government is taking in. Now the plan that the Conservatives have put
00:02:21.080 forward does require less spending and more revenue and they've detailed how they're going to get
00:02:26.960 there. For example they want to put a hiring freeze on in the public sector once we hit 2020-2021.
00:02:33.760 Another plan the Conservatives want to do is rein in consultants and hospitality expenses.
00:02:39.100 Combined these and other plans will save billions of dollars per year. Obviously long overdue and very
00:02:45.860 specific measures to find efficiencies. But I go back to the question if we think that a balanced
00:02:51.900 budget is always attainable why not bind government starting immediately? I put this question to Andrew
00:02:58.040 Scheer at his platform launch in Delta British Columbia. This is that exchange. Good afternoon Mr.
00:03:03.640 Scheer, Andrew Lawton from True North. So your plan calls for balanced budget legislation which seems to be based on the premise that a government can every year balance the budget barring unforeseen circumstances.
00:03:14.580 Why then commit future governments to something that you're not prepared to do for five years?
00:03:19.420 Well we have a lot of work to do to clean up the Liberal mess and we want to do it in a way that can allow existing core services to be strengthened.
00:03:30.680 We're going to increase those investments in health care, education and social programs by at least 3% every year while controlling the growth of government spending in other areas.
00:03:38.660 And by eliminating wasteful practices like March Madness, the government hiring outside consultants, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on outside consultants when they have expert public servants who could do the job within the federal departments and of course by ensuring that government real estate is managed much more efficiently.
00:03:57.680 So what he says basically is that it's going to take a lot to roll back what the Liberals have been doing and I understand that. I've been covering this, I've been looking at that spending, I know exactly how bad things are, but I do think there would be a great opportunity here for the Conservatives to lead by example and say we are so confident in our proclamation that a balanced budget is always possible that we're going to do it by year two.
00:04:22.680 What's interesting is that I also spoke to Maxime Bernier and I said if you have in the PPC potentially the opportunity to hold the balance of power, would you support a Conservative government?
00:04:35.680 Would you support a Conservative minority in a coalition?
00:04:38.680 And he said basically that it would depend on the budget. He would have to look and see is there something that is in his view good for Canada. This is that exchange.
00:04:48.680 We will look at their legislation, we will look at their policy, policy, each policy, and we'll decide if we support them or not. So that being said, we won't do any compromise with our principal. They will have to do some compromise to have our support. So step by step, policy by policy, we'll judge them.
00:05:07.680 So we have the opportunity for a budget that is going to be much more reined in than the one that Justin Trudeau has promised.
00:05:14.680 But again, I think it's a start in the right direction, but we cannot get anywhere as a country unless we balance sooner rather than later.
00:05:22.680 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.
00:05:24.680 So you can add it to a podcast for free하res Research Instituteと思
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